WHY DO WE LIKE WHAT WE DO?
(poverty- consumerism- finding your true path... last of A.S i speak)
Poverty has immense power in shaping the life of a human. This isn’t merely the power to deprive him of his resources. The power extends beyond that. It extends inwards, more so than it does so outwards. It breaks him. The spirit itself is suppressed, something no statistic can grasp, because all his parts are there, just not the most important one.
Poverty has been defined variously. The poverty line is a popular method for defining it. Simply, the poverty line is a measure of the minimum amount of nutrients needed for a person to live healthily and a few more necessities, taken from the basket of common goods. It is not uncommon for this basket to be limited to only the essentials and even if we consider the public services available to the poor, in itself this definition isn’t likely to fulfil the conditions for respectable living.
I have a different belief about poverty.
Poverty cannot be comprehended by merely making it a standalone definition taken out of the latest book of the art of economics. If the criterion of modern consumption was applied to Gandhiji, then no doubt he would have been declared a poverty stricken man. He ate or drank much below what the nutrition line stipulates, his consumption of goods was perhaps almost negligible and his self imposed fasts sound like bouts of starvation.
And if we consider another case, this time of a Tribal Chief. This chief resides in the interior jungles of the continent. He has the largest hut in the vicinity, he gets the best land for growing his crops and the pick of the meat whenever a hunt is organised. Of course he has 7 wives, 21 children and a whole array of spears and maces.
would you call him poor? No way we would say, considering the action that he’s getting. He is also perhaps the most respected member of his proud tribe.
But, in fact we do call him poor. He has no job to speak of, negligible consumption and the value of the goods he generates isn’t traded plus the social labour from which he benefits cant be measured in dollars.
The problem of the poverty line is that it has been designed keeping in mind the needs of a person living in a modern day (western) society. It also completely neglects the aspirations, needs, cultural differences and a whole lot of other things. It neglects the happiness of the people involved. That should not be the case.
Poverty at its very core is a measure of the inability of a man to make use of his environmental resources in the best possible manner. That does not necessarily mean the adoption of a peculiar lifestyle. If the tribals of Nyiamgiri are happy in their cultural setting, then we cannot with our biased eyes look down upon them. They have the right to live their lives as they see fit. More often than not the agents of modernism have gone to these prosperous communities and made them miserable just by introducing things that they didn’t need in the first place.
THE REAL TROUBLE
The trouble with consumerism in the modern day world is that it makes you feel miserable if you don’t have the range of products that the industry advocates. It is not necessary for you to have those products, but since the industries would go out of business if the products don’t sell, the people are FORCED into a world view that recognises only a single parameter of prosperity.
It is as if I forced a view of prosperity that depends only on the amount of dried shit that you had stored with you. If you don’t have adequate storage, I offer to provide you shit houses that will take your shit and store it in lockers. Since one type of shit cannot be differentiated from the other, these shithouses can keep on lending shit to their customers and at any given time, a whole lot of shit remains in circulation.
If shit is replaced by money and shithouses with banks, then you’d see how I elegantly described the global economy. The good thing about this approach is that we know that people don’t need the shit. They don’t know that about money.
Truly the invention of money was a great game changer in the societal evolution. It drove out the emotional value of a product out of the equation. Also, there was no need to carry your cow all the way to the market every time you needed a dress.
But the trouble began when people began to have so much of money, that if they ever brought goods with that amount, they wouldn’t be able to even have a look at each article even if they spend a lifetime at it. The rich man of ancient world was the one who had 50 cows. Mukesh Ambani can buy 50,000,000 cows if he wants to. That money in his shares and bonds and whatnot represents the collective valuation given to the pieces of paper. It is the value determined more by trust that the other person would similarly value that thing, than by its actual value.
The things that sit in the shops, the goods in short are the ultimate representation of the use lessens of the entire cycle. We don’t need most of the things sitting pretty in the shops. Because we want to buy them, we endlessly spend our health, mental energy and time on generating another value less thing. Then finally we get paid, we give our banks trust in form of credit cards and then take our object of desire. The object of desire gives us a dopamine rush that comes out of getting something new, but soon it dies out and then the cycle starts again.
We have been made addicts, slaves of the products we consume. Respect and love come for that price of abstract bank numbers going up on one side and decreasing on the other side. It is as if our society is collectively drifting away from reality, into the virtual world, into the fake relations, forced interactions… and what not.
WHAT MATTERS… AT LEAST FOR ME !!
The most real of all things are perhaps the emotions that we feel, the surge of hormones, the incomprehensible intuitions, the feelings of spirituality, of trust and of love. These have been ricocheted off the steel of our hardened minds. Plus this overconsumption is heating up the earth too, and we like the frogs in slowly boiling water are never going to find that out.
Poverty thus becomes a matter of perception. The poor doesn’t have the things valued by a vast majority of the society, or not in a quantity that a vast statistically uniform majority would approve. A poor man is subjected to the social disapproval, implicit belief that he’s an inferior being who cannot improve his condition. And the tragedy is that the poor guy believes that shit. He stops working for making a decent living, because he has been told so many times that he cannot do it.
The other tragedy is that the image of “making it big” is inevitably taken from a western perspective. The rich white man driving his Buggati on endless highways, with a starving supermodel and what not. If we all believe that is what is valuable, then it becomes valuable, the experience of that car, of being with that girl, of drinking vile drinks, of whatever the society can come up with being valuable. And the poor man works stupidly towards that, not realising what he needs.
In a way, all of us are prisoners of the modern life. I type on this computer and tomorrow I’d need a new one, for which I will have to help in producing a shitty thing to slave for another computer. What I really need is appreciation, love, nourishment, company. This can be given without these material goods, but since not everyone values my line of thoughts, I’d be considered mad for leaving everything and living in jungles.
We have to fight a system that degrades humanity. Our value isn’t because of the printed notes of paper or the things that they buy. Only companies can benefit from this mentality.
Create your intrinsic value. Shatter the mould of peer pressure, of media, of everything that rebels against the human tendency to CREATE IT’S OWN ORGANISMIC INTRINSIC VALUE.
If you traverse on this road, it is necessary to consume less, less goods, less media and instead meditate on your own thoughts. Perhaps even think more, read more and experience a whole lot more. One has to trust himself and carve out the way, everyone’s own way.
I know this looks hard, but come this is the way. `-Rumi
